Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/892

 882 Reviews of Books books with which a geographer would naturally be familiar, and useful sources also to the historian, but hardly the sources on which a history can be based. Let the American reader picture to himself the kind of history a foreigner would write of the British colonies in America, from Hakluyt, Kalm, Burnaby, Chastellux, etc., with an occasional refer- ence to a modern writer, but disregarding some of the most important modern works and practically all of the colonial documents, and the weakness of this part of the book will be apparent. The standard modern history of this period, by M. L. van Deventer, is not mentioned. Lacking also is the indispensable book on the East India Company, by Klerk de Reus. Most serious of all is the neglect of the documents in De Tonge"s collection. There are occasional references to this collec- tion, but there is hardly a page of the book on which an error could not have been corrected, or an important fact supplied, if the documents had been scanned with any care. The part dealing with the nineteenth century is no better. To enumerate the important sources which the author has failed to use would require too much space. It will be briefer, and to the wise it will be sufficient, to say that he quotes one book more than any other, and the one book is Money's ]ava: or How to manage a Colony. The result is a grotesque perversion of fact. Concluding chapters give a description of existing conditions. Per- sonal observations on the crops and some of the economic phenomena areof interest and value; reflections on the social and political organiza- tion are of little importance, because the author, to put it bluntly, does not know what he is talking about. He has not even a speaking ac- quaintance with the results of the great government investigations into native life, and because he did not know for what to look he might as well have been blindfolded much of the time. Of this as of other parts of the book it may be said that the author fails not only to collect the necessary facts from the scattered sources of information, and to sift the true from the false; he lacks, to all appearance, the general knowl- edge of human society which would direct his search, would enable him to appreciate the relative importance of different classes of facts, and would enable him to construct from his material a scientific statement of conditions. He talks much about native society, but if it were more than a name to him he must have devoted at least some attention to the land and labor relations on which it is based, of which, in fact, it largely consists. Of these native institutions he seems entirely ignorant. The problem of individual and communal land tenure is dismissed in a line. We shall have many more books like this. Colonial questions have been so much in the public mind that there is an insistent demand for a colonial science, and many rise up to proclaim themselves its prophets. We shall have a real science of colonies when we apply to the study of